Different Looks

by Raffaella Pulejo
Course Director Visual Cultures and Curatorial Practices
Brera Academy, Milano

The idea that the “new” constitutes the main quality of contemporary art, and that it is in a state of perpetual disjuncture with the past, is a misleading notion. For centuries, and before the artistic avant-garde revolution of the twentieth century, it was the repetition of established, canon-based models that held the stage and constituted the core of teaching in academies of fine art. But even when in modernity artists have subverted such canons, reciting the form in a language sometimes challenging for the public, the connection of art with the scientific knowledge of its time has never been broken. A contemporary work of art, said the artist Luciano Fabro, rewrites the whole history of art of the past, and always binds itself to a genealogy by renewing its ideas in the present. Examples of the relationships between art and science throughout Western art history are constant, to the point that it could be said that no art form is imaginable away from the scientific and technological knowledge that characterizes every civilization. Even the perfect ideal beauty of the masterpieces of classical art, which so ‘easily’ seduces us, was based on the mathematical proportions of the golden ratio, and the harmonic relationships that Greek philosophers believed governed nature and the entire cosmos.